Could water fuel cars? Believe it or
not, the answer is resounding YES. Since the oil crisis revealed the danger of
our dependence on fossil fuels, scientist & engineers have tried to come up
with alternatives. In this search, Aga Waqar Ahmed a Pakistani engineer
invented a water kit which transforms water into energy that can run vehicles. In
Islamabad the capital city of Pakistan, during a demonstration in front of
Scientist, engineers, students & media Aga Waqar drove a car fitted with
his water kit and water as fuel and it astounded all on footers.
Engineer Agha Waqar Ahmed
According to Agha Waqar Ahmed, it is
no more a fantasy his invention can be used in every vehicle to use water as
fuel. Agha Waqar Ahmed and his team took more than three years to invent this
incredible water kit. Agha Waqar Ahmed is running his car successfully by using
water as fuel for the last one year. As you see the water kit, it is very
simple and no complicated mechanism involved in it. It includes a bubbler that
filters the water and then transforms it into hydro gas by using electrolysis process
which is done with batteries. The generated fuel then transmitted to engine to
run the vehicle. The water to be used in the water kit of Agha Waqar Ahmed should
be distilled water. Distilled water is free of impurities. Impurities can be
removed after distillation process thus distilled water is cheap enough to buy.
This amazing water kit will be having
fantastic fuel consumption. With only 1 liter of distilled water, a light
vehicle may run for 40 Kilometers and similarly the motorbikes may run for more
than 150 Kilometers and you can go up to 200+ Km/h. This water kit can easily
be installed in automobiles; especially in the CNG (Compressed Natural Gas)
based automobiles. More according to Agha Waqar Ahmed, you can operate the
engine by only replacing the fuel pipes and the water kit will cost only 40K to
50K PKR.
Agha’s invention is a revolutionary
step that will help to minimize the fuel and energy crisis and the economic
burden on a common user of the whole globe. But on the other hand, Agha’s invention
infringes the stakes of multinationals and the oil giants. Because it seems in
the past, whoever stepped to invent such thing, he was either made silent or eliminated
from the scene.
It’s impossible to predict the future, but the idea that our technology will soon collide with our biological sense of vision continues to pop up in the world. Minority Report is the best fictional example, while Google Glass is obviously the closest real-world iteration of this type of collision to date.
But a new video (below) posted by Sight Systems takes a stab at how this marriage of sight with technology could manifest itself in the coming years (or perhaps decades).
The video depicts some kind of system in which the technology itself is embedded in your eyeball, meaning that tons of apps lead you through your day without any extra hardware at all. You see the main character, Patrick, work out on his floor, watch TV (on an entirely blank wall), get dressed using some type of virtual closet app, and use the Wingman app to help him through a date.
As with any large shift in technology, this type of lifestyle will have its pros and its cons.
People are constantly complaining about a lack of real-life interaction now that smartphones have pervaded the our world. You can’t talk to someone for five seconds without either their phone or your phone interrupting. And even without an interruption, there’s this constant need to Instagram it, post it to Facebook, tweet about it, text someone else about it, or even whip out the phone to look up the next stop on tonight’s journey. Sight Systems, if it was real, would change that disconnect a bit, but it would also externalize even more knowledge.
Devin explains it best in his post on the matter, but in short, the more we use knowledge found on the Internet (and not in our own minds) the less capacity we have to actually hold that knowledge internally. The best example in the video would be Patrick making his breakfast. Rather than knowing the recipe and cooking it, his Sight System gamifies the process and walks him through each individual step, virtualized on his counter-top.
While we’re already sliding down this slippery slope, Googling knowledge instead of retaining it, there are still limitations to it. Even in our hyper-connected world, there are certain times when you simply don’t have access to the Internet, and even if you do, there are things (very few things, but they exist) that cannot be looked up.
But by embedding the technology within our bodies, the externalizing of knowledge becomes internal. That sounds really meta — let’s see if I can clarify. Here’s an example:
The other day I realized that I can’t quite remember which temperature certain types of clothes should be washed at. I looked it up, and washed the clothes. That is knowledge that my mother gave me, but that I pushed out of my memory because I knew it was easily accessible (this is all subconscious, of course). If the Internet were broken, globally, and there was some sort of world disaster, the consequence wouldn’t just be me not knowing how to wash my clothes. The consequence would be billions of people who have no idea how to deal with an Internet-less world.
By embedding this type of technology in our bodies, there is absolutely zero freedom from this externalized knowledge. There is no way to resist the temptation to “look it up.” And thus, everything we know comes from the technology inside us rather than our own brains.
It’s a scary thought, but so is the ending of the video.
Brüggemann, 25, and two of his friends, all of them students at universities in Germany, used this idea to create a Windows Phone app called Greenway that aims to thwart traffic jams and get you from one point to another in the shortest amount of time.
While existing mapping apps such as Wazeand Google Maps show their users traffic jams and hazards and offer alternate routes, Greenway hopes to prevent backups from occurring in the first place by using software to predict where drivers are heading. The approach is part of a broader trend that has, for example, seen some insurers offer rates tailored to a person's driving habits—after tracking their movements via a GPS unit attached to the car.
The Greenway app, which is being tested by dozens of smartphone users around Munich, Germany, has already gained some recognition by clinching an environmental sustainability award (and a $10,000 prize) at Microsoft's annual Imagine Cup student technology competition in July. The Greenway group is now trying to secure funding to bring its app to iPhone and Android smartphone users.
The app offers users two routes to their destination: a standard shortest one and a traffic-optimized Greenway one, along with the approximate amount of time and fuel it would take to get there using each. If you choose the Greenway path, the app will ping Greenway's server every 30 seconds with your GPS location to determine if the current route is still the best—a decision made based on knowledge about your location and speed and information about other Greenway users on the road.
Greenway assumes each street has a certain capacity based on its length, number of lanes, and speed limit, Brüggemann says, and reserves slots for participating drivers, directing cars so a road never reaches maximum capacity.
If a jam does occur—which Greenway would detect by looking at your average speed—the app will react by rerouting drivers.
Brüggemann says the group's software can currently simulate up to 50,000 cars, and says results show that, on average, cars taking Greenway routes make it to their destination twice as fast and use up to 20 percent less fuel.
Of course, the Greenway app will be most useful if more people use it: Brüggemann estimates that about 10 percent of drivers in a city would need to have it running for it to work optimally. The team is hoping to make this happen by partnering with taxi companies.
The app is free. The group plans to make money by charging a small amount for the optimized navigation. Brüggemann says the fee—no more than 30 cents per route—will be calculated as 5 percent of the amount of fuel the app estimates you're saving multiplied by the average per-liter fuel price at the time. This way, he believes, users will still save fuel and Greenway will also get paid. And if you don't get to your destination in the promised amount of time, you won't be charged, he says.
But just because Greenway can get you somewhere faster doesn't always mean you'll save fuel. Benjamin Seibold, an assistant professor at Temple University who studies traffic flow behavior, says traffic research indicates that even if you take a shorter route, your car may consume more gas if you're driving in traffic that is less steady.
Still, Seibold thinks there's potential for software like Greenway to reduce traffic jams and travel times. Other navigation systems that he's aware of just show drivers current traffic information, he says, so a jam you see on a touch screen in your car might be gone by the time you arrive at that spot on the road.
"Using a predictor like in the Greenway system, even if it's not perfect, will still give a significant leap forward compared with using nothing," he says.
Let's face it, we really trust science. In fact, studies suggest that the vast majority of people will murder
another human being, if a guy in a lab coat tells them it's OK.
But surely in their insatiable curiosity and desire to put knowledge above
all things, science would never, say, inadvertently set off a chain of events
that lead to some sort of disaster that ended the world. Right?
Well, here's five experiments that may prove us wrong.
#5.Recreating the Big Bang
Scientists are kind of pissed that they weren't around when the Big Bang
happened. Here we had an event that holds all of the secrets to reality, and we
missed it because we were lazy enough not to evolve for another 13 billion
years.
The solution, science says, is to make it happen again. They assure us that
they can stage a new
Big Bang if they smash some protons together really, really fucking hard. In
fact, they can make a million of them per second, which is 999,999 more than God
managed.
God, 1. Science, 999,999.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Well, first imagine an apocalyptic nuclear holocaust. Multiply that by about
one hundred and twenty thousand billion, and then multiply that by around the
neighborhood of infinity. That equals around one eighth of the magnitude of the
Big Bang. Nevertheless, scientists are pretty sure they can contain their Big
Bang in an erlenmeyer flask, just so long as they remember to cork it.
So, Basically It's Like...
Imagine you have a huge tanker truck parked outside a children's hospital.
You don't know what's inside it, but you're fairly confident that it's either a
cure for cancer, or 20,000 gallons of explosive nitroglycerin. To find out
which, you have to shoot at it with an AK-47.
How Long Have We Got?
Meet the Large Hadron Collider.
This is not only the largest particle accelerator ever built, it's the
largest anything ever built. Originally set to come online in 2005,
then delayed until September 2008, the LHC will fire very small objects around
its 17-mile circumference at close to the speed of light, before smashing the
shit out of them and watching what comes out.
The problem, of course, is that even the eggheads don't really know what's
going to happen, which is sort of why they're doing it in the first place.
That's also why a
lawsuit was filed to put a stop to it. Scientists on the LHC project insist
there is no danger, and predict that the resulting observations could
revolutionize science and send us into a golden age of knowledge, in the event
that we actually survive.
Risk Level: 3
Experts assure us that based on everything we know about science, the chances
of doom are fairly slim. Experts also say LHC will change everything we know
about science. So there is a certain chance that one of the brand new things
they learn about the LHC is that the LHC has the ability turn the entire planet
into a fine cloud of particles.
#4.The Quantum Zeno Effect
For years, scientists have been scouring the cosmos for some kind of bizarre
hypothetical anti-gravity bullshit they're calling "dark energy". And they've
had some success with it ... perhaps at the expense of our mortal souls.
To grossly simplify it, on a scale smaller than atoms, the quantum level,
everything suddenly turns into a goddamn circus. Quantum physics is to regular
everyday physics as a David Lynch film is to a mainstream blockbuster. We're
talking particles popping in and out of existence, being in two places at the
same time, and generally acting like assholes.
Look at that particle. What an asshole.
No doubt the strangest part is the Quantum Zeno effect, which points out that
simply observing and measuring particles changes them (specifically, changing
the rate at which they decay). How? No one knows. It appears to be the closest
science has ever come to proving black magic exists. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? One prominent scientist theorized that the changes caused by simply
observing dark energy could cause it to collapse, taking the universe with
it.
Scientists, eager to see if this is true, are furiously observing dark energy
whenever they get the chance. So, Basically It's Like...
It's like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, apparently.
How Long Have We Got?
That scientist, Professor Lawrence Krauss, thinks it may already be underway.
Apparently, in the late 90s, scientists were looking at a bunch of shit
exploding in space when they caught their first glimpse of some dark energy.
This may have put the universe into a state where it may or may not pop like a
soap bubble at any given instant. Just because we looked at it. Holy
balls.
This, but with our universe in it. And about to pop.
As you've probably worked out by now, there's some weird shit out there in
the world of science. That's because a whole lot of the fundamental theories
about reality are based on mathematical equations rather than actual
observation. So there are all sorts of things out there that seem to exist in
theory, but we've never seen them. At least one scientist has suggested that if
we ever saw them with our own eyes, it's likely that we would start screaming
and never stop. Well, it wasn't so much a scientists as HP Lovecraft.
Anyway, Strange matter is one of these things. It's a hypothetical material
made up of quarks, which are one of the building blocks of reality, things so
small that you can't even possibly imagine. Seriously, don't even try to think
about it.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
There are two hypotheses about strange matter. One is that the stuff will
simply disappear a fraction of a second after it appears. The other is that it
will stabilize and convert every atom it comes in contact with into more strange
matter. It could go either way, really.
There's a theory that there are entire stars out there in the universe that
are made out of strange matter, just because a microscopic fragment of the stuff
made contact once and then everything went to hell.
Now imagine, just theoretically, if some of this strange matter should appear
on Earth. And, just theoretically, it should be stable enough to start a
reaction with regular matter. Theoretically, we'd all be fucking dead.
Not Pictured: Life.
So, Basically It's Like...
Imagine you're like the fabled King Midas, and you have the power to convert
matter with a single touch. Except that instead of gold, everything you touch
turns into shit. And everything it touches turns to shit. Before you know it,
the whole world is shit, and it's all your fault. How Long Have We Got?
Luckily for us, strange matter can only be created in high-energy particle
collisions, and nothing like that ever happens here, right? Oh, wait.
Meet the Large Hadron Collider. Again.
That's right, our friends at the LHC project expect a lot of weird things to
pop up when they start smashing atoms together, and strange matter is one such
possibility. That's why scientists have written papers with boring titles such
as Will Relativistic
Heavy-ion Colliders Destroy Our Planet?, the rebuttals to which were
basically, "Let's turn them on and find out!"
At this point we're kind of wondering whether there's anything this machine
can do that doesn't involve killing you and everyone you care about. Risk Level: 5
Scientists respond to the strange matter problem by saying if it was ever
going to happen, it would have happened already (since these kind of reactions
happen a zillion times a second in our atmosphere anyway). We like to call this
piece of rhetoric the cop-out hypothesis, because they know damned well
that if it turns out they're wrong, there won't be anyone left to sue them.
#2.Time Travel
Hundreds of stories have been written on the subject of time travel, and just
about every one of those stories involves some kind of catastrophic disaster, or
at the very least, an unhappy ending.
Of course, a lot of physicists think that it's not possible at all, and that
the very existence of the universe proves it. Also, if they invent time travel in the future, where are the time travelers?
But there's one lingering theory about the possibility of time travel that
kind of makes a lot of sense, and that's that it's not possible until we
actually build a working time machine. Maybe you can only travel back as far as
the technology actually exists, and after that it's all hovering skateboards and
flying steam trains.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Of course, there are plenty of ways in which the universe can fuck us for
daring to violate that most fundamental of laws, cause and effect. We can't even
imagine them until we know the first thing about time travel, which we don't.
But some speculate that the very attempt to travel back in time could result in
the world exploding, imploding, collapsing, shrinking into a singularity, or
simply disappearing.
But because we strive to bring you only the weirdest of possibilities, so
consider the chronological collapse scenario.
In the distant future, when the stars have burned out and the planets have
wobbled out of their celestial orbits, the descendents of humanity will be
staring extinction in the face, and if they have access to a goddamn time
machine then it's likely they're going to say "fuck this shit" and just return
to a more comfortable point in history.
A flood of refugees from the future might set up home in the present and
flourish, until the world ends again and they decide to do what worked last
time. And again. And again. Effectively, the moment we switch on our very first
time machine, our universe is going to be home to approximately infinity
refugees from the future. You do the math. So, Basically It's Like...
This:
How Long Have We Got?
Meet the Large Goddamn Hadron Fucking Collider.
Again? What the fuck? Are they doing this on purpose?
OK, so there may be like a dozen ways the LHC can destroy the universe, but
seriously, time travel?
Well, yes, according to some Russian scientists. Sure, there are no serious
plans in motion to research into building time machines, but who says it has to
be deliberate? The discovery of penicillin was a complete accident.
"Oh, shit. Honey, I think I just invented time
travel.
The theory is that the LHC might open wormholes with its high-energy
collisions that future generations can manipulate for time travelling purposes.
Apparently it's possible that those Swiss eggheads will switch on the machine
only to find a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger asking for their clothes. Risk Level: 7
You may be thinking, "If we get a time machine, and realize it will destroy
the universe, then all we'd have to do is travel back in time and destroy the
time machine! Easy!"
But then... if we destroyed the time machine, then we wouldn't be able to go
back in time... so the machine would remain intact, in which case we could use
it to go back and... Look, we don't know. Fuck science.
#1.Nanotechnology
Technology is all about making things smaller, and to that end, right now
they're working on making the smallest things possible. Nanotechnology is the
science of making robots that aren't much bigger than a molecule, and there are
lots of reasons for doing it, the biggest being because we fucking can.
Imagine sending a million microscopic machines into a person's bloodstream
programmed to attack a tumor, or shoot the AIDS virus with tiny little phasers.
Imagine swarms of little cleaning droids mopping up the pollution in our rivers,
or tiny manufacturing droids that can build anything we want, in seconds,
molecule-by-molecule.
The big problem is, of course, how you actually build trillions of these
little bastards. Simple: you teach them to replicate like cells, using materials
from the environment.
Just think about, like, a million of these little
fuckers!
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
K. Eric Drexler, one of the founding fathers of the whole nanotechnology
concept, came up with a number of spine-chillingly plausible doomsday scenarios.
The problem is our nanobots would be like cellular terminators, much more
advanced than any of the pansy-ass creations nature invented. They could
out-compete organic life overnight, obliterating it in a frenzy of Darwinism.
A million of these little fuckers!!
Taken to its extreme, we have the scenario affectionately known as the gray goo problem, which speculates the machines would simply
start replicating out of control until everything in existence is just a mass of
tiny, scuttling robots, which scientists imagine would look like a pile of gray
slop floating through the void. So, Basically It's Like...
Imagine you meet a magical leprechaun. For a bargain price, he offers to fix
up the your house and add an extra room. So you take him home, and he proceeds
to eat your house and shit out a hundred and forty more leprechans, which
promptly murder you.
How Long Have We Got?
Scientists excitedly assure us that we will have a fully operational
murderous death-swarm within twenty years, maybe even as soon as 2010. Right now they're
trying to build something called a fabricator, which from our reading
is some kind of indestructible robot swarm-queen built out of diamond, who will
give birth to trillions of nanomachines and command them to consume all in their
path. Risk Level: 10
Basically the only thing that will save us from getting transformed into
globulets of grey goo in a few years will be if the Large Hadron Collider kills
us first.
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